Ever since the 1882 premiere of Richard Wagner's final stage work, "Parsifal," at the composer's custom-built opera house in Bayreuth, Germany, performers have wrestled mightily with the problems inherent in this long, ambiguous, enigmatic, gloriously inspired music drama. While the straightforward if cautious new production of "Parsifal" Lyric Opera is presenting in honor of the Wagner bicentennial falls short of the mark in several important respects, it should comfort...

"Hero" and "House of a Flying Daggers" helmer Zhang Yimou is in talks to helm the adaptation of Robert Ludlum's " The Parsifal Mosaic " for Universal Pictures . Imagine Entertainment's Brian Grazer will produce along with Captivate Entertainment's Ben Smith and Jeffrey Weiner. Imagine Entertainment's Erica Huggins will serve as executive producer. Story follows a retired CIA operative who gets back in the game when he discovers that the woman...

"Parsifal" is a work that has long held a special fascination for a devoted segment of the opera-going public, including even those who can take or leave the majority of Wagner's music dramas. This is partly because of its Christian mysticism, partly because of its being the composer's final opera, partly because of the score's unique, ethereal beauty. Wagner called it a "staged festival play" and forbade its performance outside his operatic holy of holies, Bayreuth. And while his wishes have...

LONDON (Reuters) - Director Stephen Langridge knows MTV video clips tend to have mass appeal and Wagner operas do not, but he thinks anyone can be moved by his new production of "Parsifal", opening at London's Covent Garden on Saturday night. In the second act, New Zealand tenor Simon O'Neill as Wagner's "pure fool" of the title must resist the seductive lures of German soprano Angela Denoke's witch and temptress Kundry. She wraps herself around him and pleads that...

Even if you'd rather swallow glass shards than listen to opera, there's still much to contemplate in "Parsifal: The Search for the Grail." This PBS "Great Performances" production is a thoughtful meditation on one of the most powerful symbols of Western civilization, the sacred chalice from which Jesus Christ is said to have drunk at the Last Supper. It airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday on WTTW-Ch. 11. Yes, there's plenty of music, provided by conductor Valery Gergiev and a host of singers.

Ever since the 1882 premiere of Richard Wagner's final stage work, "Parsifal," at the composer's custom-built opera house in Bayreuth, Germany, performers have wrestled mightily with the problems inherent in this long, ambiguous, enigmatic, gloriously inspired music drama. While the straightforward if cautious new production of "Parsifal" Lyric Opera is presenting in honor of the Wagner bicentennial falls short of the mark in several important respects, it should comfort...

Wagner regarded "Parsifal," his last and least approachable work, as a "sacred dramatic festival" whose mixture of Germanic idealism, pagan myth and Christian symbolism would forever remain a closed book to the uninitiated. "Parsifal," however, long ago lost much of its cultish appeal and entered the international opera repertory. This growing appreciation of "Parsifal" may have encouraged Gian Carlo Menotti to bring his production of the work to the Spoleto Festival U.S.A.

It's been said that more has been written about Richard Wagner than anybody who's ever lived, except for Jesus Christ. Wagner no doubt would have been flattered by the comparison. Despite the manifold glories of the German Romantic composer's music, his operas can be a tough slog, with their convoluted librettos, logjams of German consonants and expansive running times that make the operas of Giuseppe Verdi - that other 19th century musical titan whose bicentennial the...

Daniel Barenboim's concert performance of Act II of "Parsifal" with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Thursday night was an event to be welcomed by all who adore Wagner's final opera, a connoisseur's item that never turns up with much frequency here. Indeed, until Lyric Opera presented "Parsifal" in 1986, the work had not been produced in Chicago for 41 years. On the face of it, Barenboim's presenting the second act in isolation seemed odd, since two of the opera's major figures,...

Having gone without Richard Wagner's music for so long, Chicago suddenly has become Wagner Central. This weekend, local devotees will be able to catch a major portion of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a complete "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" at Lyric Opera, as well as a multimedia exploration of "Tristan" and its enormous effect on the course of classical music, also at the CSO. By happy coincidence, on March...

A new production of Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" will highlight the program of the Bayreuth Festival 2000 in Bayreuth, Germany. Giuseppe Sinopoli will conduct the tetralogy, with staging by Jurgen Flimm and designs by Erich Wonder. Revivals include "Parsifal," conducted by Christoph Eschenbach; "Die Meistersinger," conducted by Christian Thielemann; and "Lohengrin," under the baton of Antonio Pappano. Tickets may be ordered in writing -- no faxes -- from Bayreuther Festspiele, Kartenburo, Postfach 10...

Asher Fisch is a musician who honors his colleagues' commitments. Good for him. Having been enlisted only last weekend to take over a round of Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concerts that were to have been conducted by music director Riccardo Muti before he took ill, Fisch stuck with the idiosyncratic program Muti had planned. He did so even though one of the works, Wagner's "Centennial March," he had never even seen or heard before. Fisch got his start...

It's been said that more has been written about Richard Wagner than anybody who's ever lived, except for Jesus Christ. Wagner no doubt would have been flattered by the comparison. Despite the manifold glories of the German Romantic composer's music, his operas can be a tough slog, with their convoluted librettos, logjams of German consonants and expansive running times that make the operas of Giuseppe Verdi - that other 19th century musical titan whose bicentennial the...

Seldom has a music director bade a more lavish farewell to an orchestra than Daniel Barenboim is doing at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra over the coming four weeks. Before he winds up his 15-year tenure with a sold-out performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on June 17, he will have favored Symphony Center with 13 orchestral concerts and three recitals. That's a fearsome workload for any musician to undertake in just four weeks. But nobody has ever accused Barenboim of being just...

In announcing next season's schedule at the Washington Opera, where he is artistic director, Spanish tenor Placido Domingo let it be known with a smile that he had just realized that six of the eight works were set in Spain. "It was really a surprise for me, even `Parsifal,"' Domingo said. "Parsifal," Wagner's quest for the Holy Grail, although written in German, is set in the monastery at what is now Montserrat, 30 miles west of Barcelona. "I am amazed how great composers have...

Lots of people like opera. Lots of people who like opera like Wagner. But how many people, even the ones who live for opera and just love Wagner, can handle the endurance test offered by "Parsifal," which is darn near 5 1/2 hours long? Well, lots of folks are up for the challenge, judging by Lyric Opera's lively ticket sales for its current production of the Wagnerian leviathan. For those willing to take the plunge, we offer a look at what it takes -- for...

By Carolyn Alessio. Carolyn Alessio teaches creative writing at Emory University and is prose editor of the Crab Orchard Review | November 16, 1997

THE MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT By Ann Patchett Harcourt Brace, 359 pages, $23 THE ILLUSIONIST By Dinitia Smith Scribner, 253 pages, $22 Several years ago, the editor of a small press told me she wished more authors would write about "sex and magic." At the time I assumed she was kidding. Aside from the work of the magical realists, I couldn't imagine anything but disastrous prose resulting from such pretensions: a story about a levitating madam, or a novel set at a nudist colony where...

Like a spaceship launched from an alternative Wagnerian galaxy, Nikolaus Lehnhoff's 1999 production of Wagner's "Parsifal" finally touched down at Lyric Opera on Saturday night. Audience opinion was divided between those who found it a stimulating reinterpretation of Wagner's great swan song and those who were put off by its pervasive ugliness and wholesale negation of the work's philosophical essence. There was a smattering of boos after the curtain came down at the end of...

Seldom has a music director bade a more lavish farewell to an orchestra than Daniel Barenboim is doing at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra over the coming four weeks. Before he winds up his 15-year tenure with a sold-out performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on June 17, he will have favored Symphony Center with 13 orchestral concerts and three recitals. That's a fearsome workload for any musician to undertake in just four weeks. But nobody has ever accused Barenboim of being just...

In announcing next season's schedule at the Washington Opera, where he is artistic director, Spanish tenor Placido Domingo let it be known with a smile that he had just realized that six of the eight works were set in Spain. "It was really a surprise for me, even `Parsifal,"' Domingo said. "Parsifal," Wagner's quest for the Holy Grail, although written in German, is set in the monastery at what is now Montserrat, 30 miles west of Barcelona. "I am amazed how great composers have...